Arctic - Ice Extent Still Well Below Normal in Arctic
Yereth Rosen
Alaska Dispatch News
May 5, 2016
Arctic sea-ice extent in April was probably at a record low for the month, continuing this year’s trend of record or near-record lows, the National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Tuesday.
Though mechanical glitches have made information from the NSIDC’s satellite temporarily unavailable, other satellite data collected by Japanese and German programs shows Arctic sea ice is much sparser now than it once was at this time of the year.
“We are way, way down on sea ice,” said NSIDC director Mark Serreze. “There’s no indication of any kind of recovery.”
He and his colleagues stopped short of declaring last month a record-low April, because the ice-extent information borrowed from the other programs is produced using a slightly different methodology than that used by the Colorado-based center, making a correlation with U.S. historical data inexact.
However, it is clear that April sea ice extent as measured by the Japanese Aeronautical Exploration Agency was the lowest ever for the month in that program’s record, which goes back a little over a decade, Serreze said.
It was also the lowest in the record kept by a University of Bremen program, which uses the same Japanese satellite, the NSIDC reported in its monthly status report.